Dead Certain (Eve Benson: Vampire Book 3) (9 page)

Gene spoke then, which showed
that he was there, on the line, too. She got ready for him to be a giant pain
in the ass about it, since as far as she knew that was his place on the
council. The one that sat back and made things hard for her, personally. How
they’d known to put him in power just for that before she was even a Vampire
was hard to know, but it still was probably right. Some kind of psychic power,
no doubt.

His voice was young and piping,
since he’d been about ten when he died. It was annoying to listen to, but his
words weren’t as bad as she feared they might be.

“That seems reasonable enough.
We’ll trust in your judgment on this, Miss Benson. I suggest that you kill
enough of his people to make a point however. If this happens again, we
won’t
be able to be as merciful. As it stands we’re going to have to put it about
that this was a favor to Marissa, the saving of his existence. Which it
is
.
Will you need aid in doing this? I believe that The Bey stands ready to assist
you, if you wish to call on him?”

It was nice to know, and she
probably could use the help, but it was a trap, she knew. Either way. If she
called for him, she’d look weak and Gene would use that against her somehow. If
she didn’t, and things were different on the ground than she’d come to believe,
then she was probably dead.

She grinned though, since Keeley
had mentioned to her once that people could subconsciously hear that in another
person’s voice.

“We’re good here. We’ll handle
this tonight, and head back in the morning. Obviously, if we aren’t heard from
in three days or so, send in the troops, and kill them all.”

Gene, her enemy on the Council,
actually laughed then.

“It will be done, Miss Benson.
Rest assured of that.”

Then the line was passed back
over to Bey, since there was actually a lot left to be said.

Overall things went a lot
differently than Eve would have guessed. Bohdan, wanting to live, and thinking,
for some strange reason that she was there to kill him, for instance. Even
after the Council had pretty much given him a nepotism pass to be a dickwad. So
other than trying to compel her almost all day long, after the call ended, he
was remarkably polite about the whole thing.

Then he called in all the
essential people in his organization, to announce the good news. The ones from
in the city came at least, which wasn’t going to be all the ones she needed to
kill by a long shot. Though, honestly, she wasn’t there to punish people for
being bad. No,
her
job was to terrify them into being good little
Vampire boys and girls.

That meant she had to act very
carefully once they were all assembled.

Bohdan waved for silence, most of
the people sitting around the room at red covered tables, the establishment
being closed for the night, and probably longer than that, since it would be
needed for cleaning the next few days, she didn’t doubt.

“We have special guests. From
America. Eve Benson, the owner of the animal blood preservation formula, and
her companion, Nicole Transmorguire. They have come to end our, mistake, here.
I have been on the phone all day with the Council, and it will be allowed for
us to have our own blood farms. Only animal blood, to start, but I’ve been
assured that it’s of fine taste and quality.”

Eve nodded, and waved to the
side, where the small batch she made up was sitting. It had taken a while to
get the needed chemicals for it, but it was a
lot
easier to do in Russia
than the U.S. for some unknown reason. Or not that unknown. There was a supply
house in town for raw materials, and they’d just bribed the workers to get what
they wanted.

The blood was a bit harder, since
they’d had to send a Human lackey to a farm to get it, and the man had only
managed to get blood from four different animals. The order had been for
twenty, but the man was, she’d been assured, more than a little lazy. It didn’t
really matter to her. It was just for a taste testing anyway. It was actually a
bit plain, not having any flavoring in it. She’d tried some though, and it was
pretty mild, and didn’t have any aftertaste of note.

“We have some samples?” Her
accent was too heavy for some of the people in the room, so Nikki repeated it
for her, which actually got the beings in the room to calm down a lot. They’d
been nervous, before that, it was clear. Some of them still were, and since
most of
those
looked like thugs, complete with tattoos and scars on
their exposed skin, which had to be fake, given that they were all dead, and
that kind of thing generally healed up when a person came over.

One of those just seemed seedy as
fuck, and was busily fingering a long blade the whole time, not even bothering
to hide it. Staring at her while he did it, too.

“We don’t need to feed like dogs.
Let’s cut this American cunt’s head off, and send her back in a box.” Sketchy
he may have been, but he spoke in nearly perfect English, so she’d understand
what the plan was. That was nice of him, right there.

It let her respond to him
directly, for instance, which she did with a big smile on her lips.

Eve moved as fast as she ever
had, a wall of pure pain taking her. The Vampire, who was a classic, but not
that fast, not even seeming to realize that she was there next to him, as she
crushed his skull. It was a nicely dramatic thing, but still not fast enough to
keep her hand clean. Then she moved back to the place she started, trying to
stand in the same location exactly. If she did it right, it would look almost
like the man had just exploded.

Everyone went still then. It was
the Vampire equivalent of screaming in fright. They did look at her though, as
Bohdan gestured at the red mist in the air.

“We have been given a
reprieve
,
but there will be payment for this. A toll in death.” He didn’t ask for
volunteers, nor did he point at the guilty ones.

Thankfully five of the beings,
three of the remaining men, and two women, tried to rush her. They died, too,
in about the same amount of time that the first man had. Six of them was nearly
enough to make the Council happy. The whole of the little rebellion only had
about eighty people in it. Decimation would mean getting two more, but she’d
taken three the night before, so it was good enough.

Unless anyone else volunteered.

She just waited, standing where
she started. No one was particularly fooled though, she didn’t think. They
weren’t looking at Nikki anyway. The entire room stared at her very closely.

“Is that enough? I think we can
sell the Council on this number of your people.” She made herself sound
peaceful, and a bit bland, rather than angry or scared. She didn’t feel it in
particular. Later she might have a problem with the deaths, even. Then again,
she might not.

It wasn’t like she’d never killed
before.

The rest of the room, the
remaining twenty or so that had come did two different things at once. Well,
three, but she left the ones that just sat there alone. Half of the remainder
attacked though, the other half trying to run away. The attackers all died, but
she was at a loss with the runners. They
could
have been guilty of
something. Or just thought they were about to die. If you thought that, then
running away was a reasonable thing to try and do, wasn’t it? Instinctual for
almost everyone. She waved at Bohdan, to let him decide.

“Stop.” The black haired Vampire
didn’t scream the word, but he may as well have. Everyone in the room, except
for her, froze in place, as the wash of compulsion ripped across the room.

She nodded though, which made him
seem afraid of her again.

“It’s enough now. Explain that to
them, please? I’d rather
not
kill everyone here. It’s a pet project of
mine, not going around slaughtering people. Anyway, so you all like the blood
well enough? If you get in on it now, I bet you can get yours for free. It’s a
decent deal, really.” She didn’t know that, but it got the others, the ones
trying to flee, to come back. No one spoke for the rest of the meeting though.

That meant they were able to get
the whole thing handled, as far as paperwork went, and spent most of the night
going over how to get funds to buy some farms. People weren’t thrilled to find
out they weren’t going to be allowed to use the stolen tax monies. Most of the
ones left were scared, but decent enough. It became kind of clear between the
lines that a few of them had actually been involved in the attacks on the
embassies, and Council people. A few had managed to do the right thing and
were, if they played their cards right, probably going to survive the night.

The people on the ground there
were afraid though. That was directed at her, too, as if
that
made
sense. She’d already done what she was supposed to, and while, yes, she was
going to lay some fuckers out if they tried to kill her again, it wasn’t like
she was foaming at the mouth taunting them into action. People were moving
around her like there were
real
eggshells on the floor. Vampires
actually minced in her presence, trying not to set her off. Like she wasn’t in
complete control of herself?

At about four in the morning they
had things worked out well enough that Eve thought leaving was a good plan.
They had a deadline, after a fashion, and it wasn’t lost on Eve that Gene, The
Burning One, was probably pretty damned serious about killing all the Vampires
there if she didn’t report in on time. Three days, she’d said, which
functionally left a little over two and a half.

So it was kind of important that
they leave, as soon as possible. Nikki however, felt a strong urge to stay
there and make puppy eyes at her part time lover. It was actually pretty cute,
and Eve got it. The woman was, if not in love, then at least very fond of the
man, and happy he was alive.

Still, if they didn’t want the
rest of the group to be dead in a few days, they needed to scurry along.

Finally, as day broke, Eve took
the bright red-haired punk looking girl aside.

“Are you staying or going?”

“What?”

Eve waved at the good looking
Vampire man standing behind them. His suit still seeming sharp and fresh,
somehow.

“If you want to stay, I can get
back in time. If you’re coming with me, we need to leave now, and really, you
should keep the whining to a minimum on this leg of things. But you have to
choose, what are you doing?”

She looked a bit sad about it,
which was probably down to the mind control she was under, and sighed, like a
schoolgirl having to leave the dance early.

“I guess we should go. I just
haven’t been to visit for a while.”

“Great. Bye Bohdan.” Without
waiting, she moved, heading back the way they came. It was going to take longer
going back, since they needed to make the whole trip in fewer legs and had a
longer distance to travel. It was harder than it should have been, because for
some reason, probably daylight related, Nicole wanted to stop far more
frequently now. Worse, she went slower. Like it was any harder to run now than
it had been before?

It gave Eve a chance to think
though, about what was really going on.

She knew that she wasn’t going to
get it all, but that wasn’t an excuse not to see some of it. For instance, it
didn’t take a Greater Demon to get that the thing with Bohdan Constantine was a
set up. Oh, it might have been real the whole time, but what were the odds that
no one else could have set things up like she had? The Council
wasn’t
filled with retards. The fact that Lenore had clearly let her take Nikki,
knowing that it might be a problem…

Eve had to struggle her way
through what she knew. It wasn’t complete, but she got little bits of it. There
were
puzzle pieces there, if she bothered to look at them.

First, it had been Fram that had
set this up. Possibly not the whole thing, but he was the one with access to
them all, and had been around to subtly influence them all, over the last
months. He’d been the one to tell her about the rebellion and who was behind
it, wasn’t he? So what were the odds that the whole thing, getting Lenore to
try and use it to set up her sister, knowing that Eve was supposed to kill her
for it, if that happened, or that Nikki might just ruin the plan, just by being
there?

Second, why had she decided to
take Nicole along?

Just to keep her alive, and awake,
during the day? Sure, but it had slowed her down a lot, and made things harder.
Maybe better in the end, but that had been a risky thing. A
lot
more so
than waiting for Bey to get there and lay down the law would have been.

Eve couldn’t see the link, but it
was there. She could
feel
it. Just like she knew where it was leading
her. That was pretty clear, wasn’t it? She was supposed to go back to the mall,
ask to speak to Lenore, confront her, and then, probably in self-defense, kill
her.

That would screw with Zack, of
course and set him off in a direction that he currently didn’t want to go. It
wasn’t the
only
thing that could happen, but it was the main one. How
she knew that, Eve didn’t really understand. It wasn’t some kind of psychic
thing. Not really. It was all just like the information had always been there,
for her to see, but she was just now learning to put it all together.

Yes, Fram was behind it, and it
was, without a doubt, meant to get several things done. One of them was
probably about her dying. The most likely outcome of her and Lenore fighting
would be her own death, after all. Even if she just snuck up and hit the
Vampire from behind, Zack wouldn’t let it stand, would he?

It was so complex that she nearly
imagined that she was making it all up.

That would have been the easier
thing to deal with. Instead, she had a problem that she wasn’t going to be able
to beat, easily, didn’t she? Somehow, to make the whole thing work, she had to
outthink a Greater Demon. Sure, a stupid one, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t a
bit like a monkey in a zoo, with no better attack on the hyper-intelligent
creatures than flinging poo at them.

It was a funny idea, but wouldn’t
really help. Plus it would make a mess.

So what the fuck was she supposed
to do?

The first thing, of course, would
be getting back in time. Nikki was dragging her down so much that she really
considered just abandoning her in Alaska, once they had gotten across. Instead
she just slowly sped up, reaching back to tug the other girl along with her,
until they were traveling at a decent pace. It wasn’t what she could have
really done, if she were alone, but they’d already had to stop something like
twenty times, so Nicole could rest.

Like that helped anything?

When they got to the mall, the
older woman took a breath too soon and stood there, screaming until her air ran
out. It was loud, and annoying, so Eve, being smarter than that, just walked in
the glass door on the west side of the place, and headed in. It had felt like
she’d been gone for months, but it had been just a few days, really. Five or
six.